It is time for the requisite inter-city Super Bowl bets. Like last year’s faceoff between New Orleans and Indianapolis, two museums have decided to put art work at stake. If the Green Bay Packers win Sunday, then the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburg will lend the Milwakee Art Museum Gustave Caillebotte’s Boating on the Yerres (1877). If the Steelers take home the Lombardi, than they will receive Renoir’s Bathers with Crab (c. 1890-1899). It’s a showdown of French impressionists, but, as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette points out, why French artists in a Super Bowl bet?
Wouldn’t a better matchup have been, say, a Frederic Remington and a George Bellows? Something with a little heft and swagger and brawn?
Whose idea was this, anyway?
The answer is blogger Tyler Green, the always up for a sports/art showdown art writer who believes that art in stadiums is “provincial,” but sees no problem with art being bet over stadium events.
So how did they pick the works?
“Both museums wanted to put up a great work of art and something that would definitely be missed from the collection,” she said. Carnegie Museum wanted to wager something from its renowned Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection but had to find a work that wasn’t already committed to an upcoming exhibit or education program.
Image: Bathers with a Crab (c. 1890-1899) (via wikicommons).
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1 comment
Hi and thanks for the plug. There’s nothing provincial about art being put in a stadium. What I said was that a museum exhibit based entirely on who a rich person had installed in a given property was “A silly, small, unthoughtful and unscholarly context for a museum to display art.”